Hey, so 3.3 PTR came down on us like a sword falling on an iceberg. From the sky. Anybody else really excited about going there and kicking some butt (we'd chew gum too, but we seem to be out of gum...) with Sylvanas and Jaina? 'Cause I sure am!

Anyway, hopefully you are wondering where the stupid metaphor came from. 'Twas all intentional. A little while ago, back in the 3.1 days, when the Argent Tournament first came to existence, something starting drilling in the Lore freaks' heads. Right next to Sindragosa's Fall (where we saw the Lich King raising the biggest frost wyrm of them all in the WotLK cinematic), there was a sword. Sword stuck in the ice, surrounded by some stones, and apparently called Quel'Delar. Related to Quel'Serrar? Or maybe some sort of Excalibur reference? We knew nothing about it, until a few minutes ago when MMO-Champion dug some information from the PTR files. It's only spells, but they seem rather interesting by themselves too...

It's flu/cough/cold season again and I've been running a fever, had a sore throat, and hacking my lungs out since Sunday, so I've been confined to my house so that I can rest. It's strange, but whenever I'm feeling fine, I always wish that I could go home and relax, maybe level up an alt, pig out on some junk food, etc. Yet when I am actually forced to be home, I wish that I wasn't sick so I could get out of the house and do something! But I can't, so I wander around the house listlessly, looking for something to do.

I don't feel very hungry, so no gobbling down my sweets; I can't read a book, 'cause my head hurts so much it's hard to concentrate on the words; I can't play any video games on my computer, because staring at the screen (which is pretty close to my face) hurts my eyes after a while; so I usually just go upstairs, lay down on the couch and watch old movies that I've seen a kajabillion times before.

So I'm pretty bored out of my skull. But that got me thinking: What do you guys do when you are sick and confined to home? Do you play video games? Watch movies? Read bo

Time for a bit of nostalgia to feed your addiction. As if it's possible to play World of Warcraft or visit Wowhead without becoming an addict. Who got you into WoW?

I remember my best e-friend named Shawn. We came from Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided, also heavy Counter-Strike players in intermediate gaming leagues (2v2 and 5v5). He introduced me to WOW when he got in the beta. I checked the website and said, "That thing looks corny, and I don't think it's exciting at all. The story sounds good, but..." Oh, how little did I know. I was addicted as soon as Maraudon came out...

Just as the new Onyxia encounter has reminded us, WoW has now been with us for five years. :)

I was preparing the posts and patch information for 3.2.2, and I couldn't help but wax melancholy (as I am wont to do) about my time in WoW. Five years makes for a lot of memories. It's not unusual to get married after a five year relationship—and yet here we are spending all of that time with a video game.

I even took some time to go back and look through how the World of Warcraft Official Site looked back in the day—does this look familiar to anyone? Dwarf mages, old fashioned troll and human models.../sigh. Those were the days.

So in honor of WoW's 5th anniversary, I've been asking the staff about their oldest and fondest memories of WoW. I've included a number of them here, after the break. Come and see!

It has been almost one year (probably a bit more, right) since the achievements system was introduced to the game. And with the achievements system - one very particular achievement. . Now that Brewfest is back around the corner, many of us are finally getting our chance to finish the trip and be rightfully awarded with a beautiful Violet Proto-Drake (that flies at 310% speed, but we want it for the beauty, of course). But how many of you stopped while doing all those achievements, and thought "Man, what I am doing is a complete absurd! I have morals, I should not be doing this for some drake!" Yea, I didn't either...

But now that we are almost done with our lovely trip, I thought I would put a list of all the weird things we've done over the last year, trying to get the Violet Proto-drake. Read on, and enjoy the (long, strange) trip!

Once upon a time, there was a Wowhead user who had a hard time managing his schoolwork because of World of Warcraft. But, as he had been playing WoW for over three years, he was reluctant to cancel his subscription. After a week of contemplation, he finally found enough strength to cancel. He even e-mailed Malgayne to have his Wowhead account banned too, hoping it would help his attempt to quit WoW.

The account’s next billing payment had been due in a week, so he figured that it would be a good time to cancel the recurring subscription. After that week had passed it was official: his WoW account was no longer active and his Wowhead account was banned until his return. Unfortunately, this did not stop him from continuing to read both the official forums and Wowhead’s forums. The urge to resubscribe was growing bigger by the day, but this user was determined to quit anything WoW-affiliated altogether until he could get his life back under control.

Fast forward to sixteen days after his WoW account became frozen. He was home sick and had nothing to do, and he was starting to feel better that day. With just WoW on his min

So I'm in my hotel room, packing my stuff up and heading down to the convention floor. I'm going to use this blog post to write down my random thoughts as we go on through the day, just in case some of you may be bored enough that they want to hear MY running commentary on their DirecTV broadcast. :P

Don't forget that for more immediate news and pictures—the kind I don't have to run up to the press room to publish—you can follow us on Twitter:

So now that I've gotten to sit back down at my computer and actually do some typing, I'm going to elaborate a little on some of the thoughts I mentioned in the previous blog, and on Twitter. I wasn't made for Twitter—I talk too much. :(

I'm also posting the (admittedly meager) gallery of photos I managed to take, though the majority of the time we were restricted from using cameras.

So 3.2 is upon us, and the Argent Coliseum is live! There's been a lot of coverage leading up to the new patch, and a lot of coverage now that it's out, but I thought you guys could use a single rundown for everything—which means that you are about to get a full-blown review of the Call of the Crusade, and all its awesomeness!

First, let me just give you the link to the official patch notes, if you prefer to read them there - and then we move on to the review!

We're going to lay this out for you: for every section, we'll have the patch notes first (click the title to see them), and then the reviews of that section of the patch notes. Then the patch notes for the next section, and so on and so on...

So here I was, reading through the official forums, when I found a thread that looked interesting. I'll spare you the unnecessary details of the thread, but the person who wrote the thread claimed to have been eighty-eight-years-old when it was written back in April of this year. You read it correctly—an eighty-eight year old, and I'm not even kidding.

That thread reminded me of an experience I had back while I was leveling my paladin during Burning Crusade. Intriguing? Read on!